


Shalt Thou Eat Bread

by justanotherStonyfan



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Infinity War spoilers, M/M, Spoilers, spoilers for Infinity War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 01:55:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14534148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherStonyfan/pseuds/justanotherStonyfan
Summary: INFINITY WAR SPOILERS AHEAD.Set before the new film.This is not the first time they meet again. This is a homecoming.(See notes for tags, until everybody's seen the film.)





	Shalt Thou Eat Bread

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
>   
> Hello! Spoilers ahead!  
>   
> 
> 
> If you're here then you've either seen Avengers Infinity War or you don't care about being spoiled for it. Heads up – this fic doesn't tell you what's going to happen in the film but it implies it pretty freaking heavily. And uses information from the film to tell the story.
> 
> Like seriously, this'll basically tell you what happens so please, if you're hoping you can get away with spoilers for this, you really, really can't.
> 
> Ready?
> 
> Okay, here we go. 
> 
> This fic takes place in Wakanda, after the events of Civil War, after the events of Black Panther. The Russos recently stated in an interview that the meeting between Steve and Bucky that we see in the film is not the first time they've reunited. This isn't their first reunion either. _This_ is a fic set a year and a half before Infinity War when, against all the odds, they've begun to hope.
> 
>  
> 
>  **Tags:** Angst with a Happy Ending, but only temporarily, outdoor sex, non explicit, freeform, pre-Infinity War, canon-compliant, boy are you gonna hate me for this one, SERIOUSLY LAST CHANCE TO STOP READING BEFORE SPOILERS.
> 
>  
> 
> You have been warned.
> 
> (Also if you don't read with authors skins enabled, this'll look shit! Sorry D:)

It's warm. 

Warm enough that neither one of them will need to share a jacket, will need to get back fast. Neither of them needing food or drink, neither of them needing tending to. It's been a lifetime since those things were true. 

Steve doesn't need lights or roads or lanterns – he knows where he's going without needing to think about it, the other half of himself calls out in silence across their existence.

There are things that sing in the depths of the trees and the mountains, little things that sit and creak like woven branches, little things that drop and squeak like running water, with the coming of the night. Little things that whisper from the shadows that enclose them, keeping them from the outside world though they're so far from it. Everything conspires to hide them, here, to offer them a space to live in freedom, without fear.

All he leaves as he walks is fading bootprints, heavy soles to bring him step by step, bending blades of grass that spring back silently even as he moves, so that soon his path is invisible, soon his passing through the reeds and grasses might just as well be mist. There are branches that part for him, hills that slope and rise so he might walk them, things that watch with mirrored eyes from the twisting wood and hidden thickets, and things that cry in the darkness.

He walks for miles beneath a purpling sky that turns so soon to blue, deep like the oceans are deep, worlds and galaxies spread out above him, flung by chance and circumstance to paint the darkness in light. 

His feet will take him there because his soul already knows the way, is already there.

His pace is steady as his heart until he reaches one crest, rising above it to stand and stare and there, flickering in the distance, a light. A life.

Home.

To that from which we came, we go back.

He doesn't call, does not cry out, but his feet fall more heavily, his heart beats less steadily – to that from which we came, we go back, and his body yearns, his bones ache. The pieces of himself that he has left here call to him sing too in the depths of his heart like the night-hidden creatures, and his steady pace, his calm, both are but masks to be shed in the face of this.

The fire burns within though there's no need for it on a night such as this, a night close and heavy like a coming storm, and he knows he can be of no surprise. To anyone else, but not to him. Indeed, he's met – not in their home, not at their threshold, but halfway to it, steps like his own that fall faster on the grass and dirt, figures in the night and neither of them slow, hands outstretched. 

Drawn inexorably, they crash together with the pain of each parting close behind, stinging eyes and burning throats and arms that wrap so tightly, so nothing will ever pull them apart again, and he is weak. His limbs almost too weak to hold him, his voice almost too weak to speak.

“Steve,” Bucky says, the scent of him, the warmth of him.

“Oh, Buck,” he whispers, hands wound tightly in soft fabric and softer hair, face buried against soft skin, “Bucky.”

Said like promises, tasting names to keep them in their mouths, held like truths and sent like prayers. _Here I am and hoped you'd be, here we are alive together._

If he could disappear, if he could climb inside, if they could share a body as two souls, he'd do it. A funny word, some say - strange and hard to give, harder still to live without but they, for them, they've never hesitated.

“I love you,” he whispers, against warm skin because it's been so long since the time that he could. 

They need not move, not yet, need not let go and step apart when they are so much more whole together. There they stand beneath the wide-topped trees and painted sky and hold, and hold. 

“I missed,” he whispers, the words tight and stitched with the colors of their anguish, the threads of their memories, “I missed you, I _missed_ you,” these words are said for no-one else, because it's not their being said, it is the love behind them. 

It is that reunion, that rejoining, rejoicing, that return, to that from which he came.

Like the first breath out of water, the dropping of the weight from his back, the world from his shoulders, he has missed, and he loves, and this presence is balm to him, this love is relief to him. Stretched too thin, pulled too far apart, but now together, without strain, without difficulty.

And yet, altogether, all at once, not enough. They are still separated, still parted by metal and fabric, and it pains him when the other half, when this missing piece, moves back.

“Bucky-”

Bucky takes his hand, skin to skin, it fits - it always has, even now – and pulls him forward, away from the unneeded fire, from their threshold and their haven, to the water.

It is the water by which he has stood every day for a year and a half, the water in which he bathes, the water in which they've swum together, in which Bucky learned to swim without his arm, in which Steve has always held him when he has tired. 

Tonight, the surface is like glass, barely a breeze to stir the reeds, nor a breath to disturb the grass, a heavenly mirror. 

At the edges of the water, beneath the deep night and the bright stars and the dust clouds that lie far beyond Earth's atmosphere, together with each other and miles from another soul, fireflies. Tiny lights of yellow, like stars themselves that glow so brightly they're almost green, flare bright and then fade. They are silent, though the world about them is not, and pull at the edges of his vision as though to bring the heavens down to earth.

“Here,” Bucky murmurs, and Steve can feel the calm in him, the empty spaces where guilt hid, where pain waited, the care where once distrust and self-loathing grew.

Bucky sits in the grass by the edge of the water and waits for Steve to sit with him, to wrap him up in the kind of embrace that holds them both together. 

The things that he has been through are things that Steve's mind won't recognize. He reads files, sees scans, he acknowledges. He understands, but he cannot comprehend. Guilt weighs heavy on him, and Bucky knows that there are nights he does not sleep, nights he turns over, breaths hard and fast, and leans over him, gazes down at him, stares and waits for sunrise to show him that what he sees is no more a dream than the bed on which they lie, than the world in which they hide.

Steve hears too much, he feels too much, and has tried to keep it hidden, too. He'd pushed it back and held it close, desperate not to speak out of turn, not to pass his burden on, hiding all that he could not because he didn't care but because he did. 

Nights awake and staring at the stars, nights asleep and dreaming of the terrors they've both witnessed, nights in turmoil and anguish spent somewhere in between sleep and waking - where the monsters wait.

But this, this tranquillity between them is a learned thing, practised and practised, tried over and over. A man who couldn't trust his mind and a boy who couldn't trust his heart. He's but a child when it comes to Bucky. They've lived to be a hundred, both of them, and he's still so young, so open, just as soon as Bucky says his name.

He sits in the long grass by the still water, amongst the silent fireflies and the singing creatures, beneath the starry sky, and he pulls Bucky closer.

When they were young, truly young, Steve was but nothing. Too easy to shake, to lift, too easy to knock down and push back. Bucky's arm could span his shoulders and perhaps another man's, too. Narrow and sharp, Steve had been tucked under Bucky's arm so many times and then...

And then...

Then Steve's arms had spanned him instead, Steve's strength had raised him, Steve had held him and helped him and now...

And now....

To that from which we came, we go back.

Now it is Steve who holds a man whose body he can span easily. Bucky has no left arm and it makes him narrow. Steve can hold him this way, can wrap his arm about Bucky, where his shoulder would be, and hold him close, safe. No-one can hurt him like this, no one can reach him through Steve. 

“Here,” Bucky says, to pull him down, and perhaps Steve might pretend to think that they lie in the soft grass to gaze at the stars, but he knows better. 

Soft cloth comes undone beneath deft fingers, a smile that's softer still, lit by flitting lights and endless skies, hair an inky cloud about Bucky's head.

“I love you,” Steve says again, because the words are not enough, cannot provide what a hundred years already knows. 

Life, heart, soul – all, for him, and given willingly.

“You're my life, Buck, I'm nothing without you,” he says, and Bucky's hand is careful but still skilled, reaching first for his face to touch, to cradle.

“We're nothing without each other,” Bucky answers, in a moment of truth, of honesty, so rare, a moment of emotion so rarely shown, that Steve can scarce breathe.

“I love you,” he says, “I love you,” for what else is there to say when you mean it so thoroughly?

Love so strong and pure as this must be dangerous, all consuming, love so strong as this must burn. Can both be Icarus? Patroclus both? They have been called dangerous, but which is moreso – the fiercest warrior or the one for whom he'd give his life? 

They shift and fumble, searching and finding, paying special mind to tasks that need care and time because they have the time. They have the time, they have as much of it as they could need. 

When they kiss, it's like brands, searing and permanent, marking souls and skin. When hands roam, they are searching, learning everything that can be learned, all that has been forgotten. And, when skin meets skin in the gentle living-sound of the world around them, it is that same relief, that same lifting of the weight, that same first life-giving breath.

They are two more creatures, then, crying out, singing in the night with clutching hands and straining bodies, a life like this, that's so far from the life they've had. Warm and well fed, recovering and safe, they make love in the starlight, lanterned insects like a haze of dreams about them. 

When it is over, when they lie quiet and sated in each others' arms, staring at each other as though the stars do not exist, it is then that they speak. It is no simpler, no easier, to live apart as two, to be two different beings when you ought only be one, but they are side by side, skin to skin. This is as close as they can be. 

Steve stopped trying to understand how much he loved Bucky - there was nothing that could explain it. The blades of grass make a reasonable bed, and no-one will disturb them tonight.

Bucky has come so far, has relearned so much, has regained so much of himself. Steve loves him more than anyone, without exception. Steve loves him more than anything, Steve will give himself to keep him, Steve could not live with half his soul carved from him.

Bucky looks up at him, cradles his face and follows the lines of it with his fingertips, follows the movements with his eyes and doesn't speak. When Steve kisses him, it is soft and slow, an outpouring of his love now that their desperation has been tempered.

Although they've both mentioned it, neither one of them is sure – is the strength in what they feel born of something new or something old? But it doesn't matter. If you give everything you have to save everything you love, that's all that really matters in the end.

“Ever wonder what we're doing here?” Bucky whispers.

“No. I'd live here forever with you if I could.”

“You couldn't; you'd get bored.”

“I could,” he says. “For you. I could spend my whole life loving you.” _I already have, and why change?_ “I will spend my whole life loving you.”

“If I could spend the rest of my life here,” Bucky tells him, “I think I could be,” a word they've never dared to think, a hope they've never dared to have, "happy."

“Then we will,” Steve answers, a promise on his tongue to be given when they kiss. “We will. We'll spend the rest of our lives here.”

This is who they are, who they have always been. Missing pieces, two halves. Born from each other as a perfect fit, at rest together, where they ought to be, full circle. 

To that from which we came, we go back. 

  


.........................................For dust thou art, 

 

  


and unto dus t....s.h.a.l..t........t..h..o…u............r....e.....t.......u.......r........n

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
